This invention relates to pasta extruder apparatus which may be used as a separate appliance or may be arranged to be driven as an attachment to an existing kitchen appliance, such as a food processor, for shaping articles of food from fresh-mixed dough or alimentary granules known as pasta to form such strand-like food items as spaghetti, vermicelli, noodles, ribbons, strings, etc. More particularly, the apparatus includes counter-rotating intermeshing gears which force the pasta out through an extrusion die in a compact, efficient arrangement.
Conventional prior pasta extruders employ a helical feed screw in an elongated tubular barrel, which pushes the pasta in a forward direction along the barrel toward an extrusion die located at the exit end of the barrel. Such helical feedscrew apparatus waste considerable power in the frictional heating of the pasta mixture, such frictional heating occurring as a result of slippage of the pasta dough along the inner surface of the barrel and slippage along the inclined flights of the feed-screw as well as by the churning of the pasta mixture produced by the feed-screw action. The feed-screw must of necessity be long and requires several turns of the screw flight to get enough "bite" to push the pasta mixture through an extrusion die. Accordingly, such apparatus is bulky, inefficient, expensive and requires a powerful drive motor, which wastes a considerable amount of electrical energy. Moreover, the end of the feedscrew flights near the extrusion die tends to scrape the pasta mixture through the die with a deleterious, intermittent scraping or wiping action as the end of each screw blade or blades scrape past the die. In distinction, the extruder apparatus of the present invention uniformly pressurizes the pasta mixture in a chamber adjacent to the die plate for substantially uniformly extruding the pasta through the various orifices in the die plate.